While the release of Gladiator II (November 13 in France) will once again bring ancient Rome up to date, National Geographic takes the opportunity to clarify things by highlighting eight erroneous statements about this era. Founded in 31 BC. BC, the Roman Empire exercised its influence throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. But isn’t the Rome we think we know sometimes more fiction than reality?
The first myth concerns the fact that gladiators always fought until death ensued. However, in his book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephantshistorian Garrett Ryan explains that gladiators only died in a fifth of fights. It was in fact unprofitable to let them die in the arena, since a dead gladiator no longer brings in any money.
We have also read here and there that the ancient Romans indulged in feasts so gigantic that they had a special room in their villas where they could purge themselves before gorging again: the vomitorium or vomitorium. . However, if these architectural elements present in the amphitheaters and arenas did indeed exist, they had nothing to do with vomiting: despite their name, they were simply spaces allowing spectators to enter and exit smoothly.
Nero’s violin does not exist
Another erroneous belief concerns the color of ancient statues. Most people imagine that these have always been made of smooth white marble. However, this colorless appearance is more the result of chance than of art. The Roman world was very colorful, as were its busts and sculptures. Artists applied layers of vivid paint to their marble works to represent everything. But the paint has faded over timegiving the sculptures their current colorless appearance.
Among ancient legends, one has it that Nero coolly continued to play the violin during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE. The image is cinematic, but it is also completely fictional. Actually, violins didn’t even exist at that time: they only appeared before the Middle Ages. Furthermore, sources report that Nero, on the contrary, tried to help fight the flames and bring aid to those affected.
As for the statement that Roman women were required to stay at home, this is also false. Certainly, Rome was a patriarchal society, in which women had fewer freedoms than men, were deprived of their civil rights and could not hold public office. However, they could own property and exercise political influence. In 195 BC. BC, women even took to the streets of Rome to protest against the “lex Oppia”, a law which limited what they could wear.
The idea of uniformity of dress and spoken languages is also false. The Roman Empire, which extended from present-day England to Turkey, was, on the contrary, distinguished by its great cultural variety. It included different peoples, cultures and languages, such as Aramaic, Greek and Gaulish. The emperors themselves were not always from the Italian peninsula: Trajan was born in present-day Spain, while Septimius Severus hailed from what is now Libya.
In the history of Christianity, a chapter regularly surfaces: it concerns the martyrs who were tortured and killed in the Colosseum. However, there is no historical evidence that this happened. On the other hand, other places in Rome, like the Circus Maximuswere the scene of religious executions. It was not until much later, in Ve century, that stories of martyrs at the Colosseum began to appear.
Finally, contrary to what is commonly claimed, Rome did not fall in the year 476 AD. Technically, this was not the end of the Roman Empire. In the year 330 AD. BC, it had in fact divided into two parts: the Western Empire, based in Rome, and the Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople. Although Romulus Augustulus had been overthrown in 476, Zeno, the emperor of the Eastern Empire, had not. This part of the empire survived as the Byzantine Empire for the next millennium.
Source: www.slate.fr
